An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days
when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those
old dinosaur parts carried terrific angular
momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and
stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to
‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a
couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that
walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the
staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could
also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the
whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction).
Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing
patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive
races.